The group above was a mix of consultants and students, many of whom met for the first time at the event. They showed team spirit, insisting all members get included in a photo of their multidimensional server temperature sensor.

The winning team developed ideas for a distributed sensor network to monitor a data center. The Open Compute Foundation that hosted the event offered them a prize of subsidizing the costs of filing for a patent on the work or help bringing the product to market.

Facebook's Prineville, Ore. facilities manager worked on a Bluetooth link to report stats from an individual server.
But a more ambitious effort--that won the prize--worked on a sensor network to report details from many servers. I have no other info on it, though.